Office System touts time benefits
Published: 27 Oct 2003 12:25 GMT
But you've kept adding features to the Office applications, and studies have shown that something like 95 percent of the features don't get used.
There's a misconception that people focus in on a certain percentage of what they use.
Actually, I don't know of any studies that really show that. The studies we look at... show that if you look across an organisation, a very high percentage of all the capabilities get used by some people. What customers wanted and very clearly told us, dating all the way back to the late 80s, was that they wanted a set of tools that could be the same across their organisation. So that if somebody's in finance, and they're doing very sophisticated Excel analysis, they'd have access to those capabilities. And if somebody's doing technical documents, they'd have access to those capabilities in Word.
Whether the person in technical documentation is using all those Excel capabilities -- that's really not the point. The point is: can they have capabilities that make their job better and, for reasons of ease of support and training, have the same kind of software across the organisation?
What does that say about people's perceptions?
There's a misconception that people focus in on a certain percentage of what they use. In the end, what matters is if we provide users with things that make a difference for them. That's what they care about. And that's what we do in every release of the product.
What's was the motivation for adding all the XML hooks? Common wisdom says this is the only way for Microsoft to keep making money off Office, to use it as a lever into the enterprise.
The whole thing about client boundary, server boundary -- frankly that's more interesting to industry insiders than it is to users. At the end of the day, what users really care about is things that help them get their job done more easily. I don't spend a lot of time sitting there saying, 'Office -- everybody sees it as a client, now we're going to focus on servers.' What I focus on is (that) there are people who are trying to get their jobs done. And as a part of getting their job done, making it easier for them to have access to the information they need for their work -- that's important.
The thing that's kind of funny about these claims is that it's kind of like, 'oh well, now that we have this XML technology, now let's figure out how to expand the Office business using XML.' When the fact is it really comes from the reverse. It comes from really understanding what it is people are trying to do and what would help them do something better. And it turns out that XML is a great way to facilitate access to information... At the end of the day, what matters is not that it's XML doing this stuff but that it does something important for the user.
Let me now take the other side for a second. It becomes worthwhile to think about the technology, when you think about how you can generalise that sort of solution broadly. In software, we like to talk about software architects. And this is an example where some great technical minds really thought deeply about the architectural approach we could use to generalise the ability to support these kinds of solutions. But still, the key thing was there was a set of scenarios -- specifically the ability to use Office as the foundation for a set of solutions -- that was driving the use of XML.
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